Roughly 3.5 million pounds of laundry was costing about $750,000 a year

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A new program for dirty laundry at the Cook County Jail could save hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

Updated at 6:00 PM CDT on Monday, Oct 4, 2010

A new program for dirty laundry at the Cook County Jail could save hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

Sheriff Tom Dart said Monday that the prison will now handle its own laundry, with veterens locked up for non-violent crimes doing the dirty work.

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"A lot of us do our own laundry ourselves. And the fact that our detainees were not involved with that was something that we weren't real excited about," Dart said.

The program began last month. Already about 20 jailed military veterans are employed in the program.